Dvořák’s use of folk music in classical composition influenced Dawson.

Dawson's best known symphonic work was his Negro Folk Symphony. The thematic basis of the three movement orchestral work was rooted in folk music: the songs of Dawson’s culture. "If you want to know what a people are" Dawson contended, "you go to their folk songs." He wanted his symphony to give voice to the music of his ancestors, friends, and neighbors in rural Alabama and the segregated South. As related by Eileen Southern, “Dawson was directly inspired by (Antonín) Dvořák’s views on nationalism in music. His aim was ‘to write a symphony in the Negro folk idiom, based on authentic folk music but in the same symphonic form used by the composers of the [European] romantic-nationalist school” (Johnson, 46-47; Southern, 427).